Since Donald Trump took the oath of office, one thing has been clear: this administration’s foreign policy would effectively be up for sale. We’ve long seen the President’s personal business interests influence America’s foreign policy and the nations that offered his campaign help during the election receive preferential treatment. And today, the level of corruption continued to escalate with this bombshell report from the BBC:

Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, received a secret payment of at least $400,000 (£300,000) to fix talks between the Ukrainian president and President Trump, according to sources in Kiev close to those involved.

The payment was arranged by intermediaries acting for Ukraine’s leader, Petro Poroshenko, the sources said, though Mr Cohen was not registered as a representative of Ukraine as required by US law.

Mr Cohen denies the allegation.

The meeting at the White House was last June. Shortly after the Ukrainian president returned home, his country’s anti-corruption agency stopped its investigation into Trump’s former campaign manager, Paul Manafort.

The BBC also goes on to cite a report that indicated the following:

The report states that Poroshenko returned from Washington and, in August or September, 2017, decided to completely end cooperation with the US agencies investigating Manafort. He did not give an order to implement this decision until November 2017.

The order became known to the US government after scheduled visits by Poroshenko’s senior aide to see Mueller and the CIA director, in November and December, were cancelled.

The report says that an “element of the understanding” between Poroshenko and Trump was that Ukraine agreed to import US coal and signed a $1bn contract for American-made diesel trains.

These deals can only be understood as Poroshenko buying American support, the reports say.

In March, the Trump administration announced the symbolically important sale of 210 Javelin anti-tank missiles to Ukraine.

Even under President Obama, the US did not sell arms to Ukraine.

And there you have it. Donald Trump’s “fixer” Michael Cohen being paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to set up a meeting between the President of Ukraine and the President of the United States. Not only that, the dropping of Manafort’s case was reportedly a direct appeal to obtain the President’s patronage.

7/ What the article shows is that a desperate nation paid Cohen at least $400,000 and killed a Manafort probe to help Trump because he’s the President of the United States. Russia bet on Trump and won, so Russia’s enemy had to change its stance to get “non-aggression” from Trump.

The piece goes on to report that Felix Sater helped Cohen in this endeavor. Aside from one of the failed Trump Tower Moscow deals, Cohen and Sater also collaborated on the Ukraine peace deal…

On January 27, 2017, Cohen, and Sater met with Ukrainian lawmaker Andriy Artemenko at a dinner in New York in an attempt to create a back-channel peace deal with Ukraine and Russia. A move many saw as a covert method to lift sanctions. Artemenko left the sealed plan with Cohen who was supposed to deliver it to former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn. Artemenko claims he “got confirmation” from Sater that his plan was delivered to the White House. Artemenko confirmed the dinner took place and that the intention was to create this deal. Cohen confirmed the dinner took place but denies this was the content discussed. Because of this deal with Cohen and Sater, Artemenko has since been stripped of his citizenship and accused of treason…

I bring this other deal up because it further bolsters my next point. Michael Cohen did not register as a foreign agent before working on behalf of a foreign government. Given the fact Special Counsel Robert Mueller charged Rick Gates and Paul Manafort under the Foreign Agent Registration Act, this adds another worry to Cohen’s mountain of legal issues.

To cover both sides of this story, here is the Ukrainian media using some familiar language.

Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko calls reports that his staff paid Michael Cohen $400,000 fake news and “an attack on Ukraine and America, and their partnership.” https://t.co/nSx7ufKaV3

President Trump went on a tweetstorm, continuing his false conspiracy theory about his campaign being spied on.

Look how things have turned around on the Criminal Deep State. They go after Phony Collusion with Russia, a made up Scam, and end up getting caught in a major SPY scandal the likes of which this country may never have seen before! What goes around, comes around!

The Trump Tower meeting with Donald Trump Jr., Paul Manafort, and Russian operatives where dirt on Hillary Clinton was sought.

The December Trump Tower meeting with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak and Michael Flynn where a back channel line of communication with Russia was proposed.

The December meeting with Sergey N. Gorkov who runs VneshEconomBank (VEB), a Russia owned bank that is currently under U.S. sanctions that were put in place in 2014.

Speaking of Kushner, he received his permanent security clearance today. This came in spite of the fact Kushner has had to amend his SF-86 at least three times, adding over 100 meetings with officials from over 20 countries and over 100 foreign contacts — willful omission on an SF-86 is a felony.

President Trump’s Twitter blocking has been deemed unconstitutional.

Breaking News: President Trump’s practice of blocking Twitter users who criticize him violates the First Amendment, a federal judge ruled https://t.co/TL4BnizlyO

The NFL will fine players who kneel (protest racial injustice) during the national anthem.

Robert Mueller has requested to begin sentencing for Trump’s campaign adviser George Papadopoulos, who pleaded guilty to lying about his contacts with Russians.

This likely means Mueller won’t use Papadopoulos as a trial witness. Whether that’s because he won’t be indicting anything he could be useful for, because the case is tight without him and/or because there is an issue with putting P on the witness stand isn’t clear yet. https://t.co/NBUEM7qwZo

Lesley Stahl shed light on the reasoning behind Trump’s war on the media.

Lesley Stahl says @realDonaldTrump explained to her why he continues to attack the media: “You know why I do it? I do it to discredit you all and demean you all, so when you write negative stories about me no one will believe you.” Video: https://t.co/A9jzC7LDkI

Ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee Rep. Adam Schiff (R-CA) claimed that the controversial meeting slated for tomorrow between DOJ and members of Congress will also include Democrats, after they weren’t initially invited.

But Nunes and Gowdy will get their briefing first. Then the Gang of Eight will attend in the afternoon. Gowdy, who is NOT in the Gang of Eight, gets to attend that briefing as well. And John Kelly will be at BOTH meetings. Sarah Sanders said yesterday WH would NOT attend meeting

]]>https://rantt.com/rantt-rundown-cohen-trump-ukraine-and-pay-to-play-diplomacy/feed/019438Why Republican Voters Will Never Be Satisfiedhttps://rantt.com/why-republican-voters-will-never-be-satisfied/
https://rantt.com/why-republican-voters-will-never-be-satisfied/#respondWed, 23 May 2018 20:14:25 +0000https://rantt.com/?p=19419Republicans have set themselves up for a perpetual cycle of outrage and despair, no matter how many elections they win

All this seems paradoxical to put it bluntly. Republicans control all three branches of government and the majority of governorships, and their political opposition has been bullied into relative submission as the media continues to define it using primarily GOP-approved talking points and strawmen. So what exactly do their voters have to feel so angry about and why is the party that dominates, well, everything, acting like the embattled underdog? Because in a way, they are.

By far the most common themes for Republican voters are nostalgia and conspiracy theories. In a nutshell, they want to turn back the clock 60 years to when they felt ascendant and could get away with whatever behavior they pleased because society deemed it acceptable. There was no such thing as global competition or corporate consolidation on a massive scale, and automation was a staple of science fiction, not an everyday job-stealing reality. But unless they can go back in time, un-invent computing or the internet, then find an immortality serum, they’re picking a fight they simply cannot win. Hence they turn to conspiracy theories to explain this failure.

It’s an inevitability that new ideas and technologies emerge, older generations retire and die, and younger generations with new ideas take over, changing cultures and demographics in the process. Trying to stop it is like battling entropy. It doesn’t work in physics and it won’t work with humans. Change may take centuries and happen in fits, occasionally backsliding under heavy resistance, but it will happen. Instead of embracing that change and working with future generations to leave them a better world, or at least accepting it, today’s elders are fighting to turn back the clock and in the process, legally and financially handicapping their children and grandchildren.

On its own, this would be bad enough, but the right-wing media ecosystem makes it much worse by constantly coming up with scapegoats and conspiracy theories for middle-aged and senior citizens, siccing them on their own families and friends while casting the normal growing pains of a nation at an economic and cultural crossroads as malicious plots against them. As a famous comment about Fox News so eloquently put it…

They were enthralled by Fox News, had it on day and night, whenever they were awake, and it infected them with paranoia, anger and most of all, fear. Visits were consumed with lectures about the latest conspiracy theory about nefarious plots by the Clintons, Obamas, minorities, poor, or whoever else was allegedly hell-bent on destroying their way of life that day. When my grandfather died, it took hours of searching to find where he’d hidden all of his valuables and guns — Obama, you see, was coming to take them at any moment. He lived in a constant state of dread.

This constant sense of fear and anger didn’t die with Trump’s election because for all his bluster, he has proven blatantly incompetent at his new job, and as an investigation into his hideously corrupt dealings with foreign governments and aspiring domestic oligarchs keeps gaining steam, all that rage was emptied into a new set of conspiracies. Meanwhile, the world keeps changing because time hasn’t stopped and our culture and ideas haven’t been encased in entropy-proof amber, seemingly giving credence to the klaxons rang by aging populist pundit. They cry that the forces of evil are still out to get Real Red Blooded Americans so they can do horrible things to the country they love just for the sheer hell of it.

This culture of fear mongering been a staple of lucrative right-wing graft for the last half century and has no incentive to change. But its side-effect is the perpetual furious paranoia of the right for whom the sun will never shine again because another boogeyman is always around the corner. No wonder so many Republicans feel disrespected, sidelined, and miserable. With exasperated salesmen of fear and outrage bellowing that exact message in their ear all day long, pitting them against friends and loved ones trying to rebuff constant attacks quickly cast as more evidence of evil deeds against them, who wouldn’t be?

President Trump, in coordination with House Republicans, has concocted numerous schemes to undermine Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation – which he is a subject of. There was last year’s White House-engineered “unmasking” scandal fueled by House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-CA). There was this year’s dubious memo alleging FISA warrant abuses against Trump Campaign Adviser Carter Page (who was suspected of being a Russian agent), pushed by none other than Devin Nunes. And there was the scandal surrounding the anti-Trump text messages from the FBI’s Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, a charge also led by Devin Nunes and other Republicans. All of these ended up being hot air, but nevertheless, they persisted.

Now, we have this claim:

Reports are there was indeed at least one FBI representative implanted, for political purposes, into my campaign for president. It took place very early on, and long before the phony Russia Hoax became a “hot” Fake News story. If true – all time biggest political scandal!

I hereby demand, and will do so officially tomorrow, that the Department of Justice look into whether or not the FBI/DOJ infiltrated or surveilled the Trump Campaign for Political Purposes – and if any such demands or requests were made by people within the Obama Administration!

The President of the United States just demanded the Justice Department investigate his political opponents in an effort to undermine the Justice Department’s Russia investigation–a probe he is a subject of

Trump’s narrative that this campaign was “infiltrated” for “political purposes” is quite the inflammatory claim and one that he has no evidence of. But that did not stop him from intervening in the Justice Department’s investigation that he is a subject of. Not only did he make this demand, which Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein then referred to the DOJ’s Inspector General, Trump met with Rosenstein, FBI Director Christopher Wray and Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats. In that meeting, President Trump got these officials to agree to share classified information with Republican lawmakers about this informant. The name has been published elsewhere, but Rantt Media has decided not to participate in the doxing of a U.S. Intelligence source.

This all comes as House Republicans call for a second special counsel to investigate the FBI.

If you only listen to President Trump and the GOP propaganda machine, then you’d think the FBI literally embedded someone into the Trump campaign as part of a deep state conspiracy to take down a presidency that hadn’t even begun and looked unlikely at the time. Like almost everything this President says, the known facts don’t agree.

What has been reported is that this FBI informant met with at least three Trump campaign advisers who the FBI believed were having contacts with Russian nationals. This was during the counterintelligence phase of the investigation and is typical in an operation of this nature.

Former FBI counterintelligence agent Asha Rangappa explains how the informant was not spying on the Trump campaign, but, as part of the counterintelligence operation, may have been trying to protect the campaign.

But Trump and his backers are wrong about what it means that the FBI reportedly was using a confidential source to gather information early in its investigation of possible campaign ties to Russia. The investigation started out as a counterintelligence probe, not a criminal one. And relying on a covert source rather than a more intrusive method of gathering information suggests that the FBI may have been acting cautiously — perhaps too cautiously — to protect the campaign, not undermine it.

I love it when the @nytimes verifies my op-ed theory. The idea that the FBI was trying to “do in” Trump is hogwash. They were being cautious and slow (perhaps too much so, IMO) so as not to draw attention to their investigation. pic.twitter.com/pTmNwqOqBa

Just to be clear, the big NYT and WaPo pieces explaining the real story with the FBI informant have reduced the narrative being pushed by Trump, Nunes and their loyal propagandists to a pile of smoking rubble. https://t.co/6wfNUydHrz

None of the known evidence indicates this was politically motivated. And if it was, wouldn’t the FBI have leaked the fact that the Russia investigation was underway before the election, rather than send a letter relating to the Clinton email probe?

This, like many of Trump’s other baseless efforts to undermine a legitimate investigation, has been allowed far too much oxygen. There isn’t enough universal pushback from the Democrats and many in the media have failed to successfully fact-check and give proper context to Trump’s claims.

For those who need an update, in its first year, Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election has already yielded 75 charges filed against 22 people or companies, at least 5 guilty pleas (3 of which came from Trump’s associates), and 1 person sentenced. It’s also discovered other foreign nationals seeking to provide help to the Trump campaign, found evidence of potential criminal wrongdoing which sparked a separate investigation into Trump’s “fixer” Michael Cohen (now being handled by the Southern District of New York), and appears to have compiled a pretty solid case for obstruction of justice. We haven’t even touched on Trump’s potential money laundering and election law violations.

This is 99% accurate.

My quibble is continuing to call it the Russia investigation. This is the Russia, UAE, Ukraine, Saudi, Turkey investigation. This is international corruption on a global scale. Trump’s candidacy was up for sale. The highest bidders are reaping the rewards. https://t.co/K6g5Dm0yE8

With so much more to uncover, keep your eye on the ball and never take anything you see at face value.

Meanwhile…

President Trump hosted South Korean President Moon Jae-in at the White House and signaled a potential delay in the planned June summit with North Korean Dictator Kim Jong Un and backed away from one of his biggest demands. The New York Timesreported:

President Trump opened the door on Tuesday to a phased dismantling of North Korea’s nuclear weapons program, backing away from his demand that the North’s leader, Kim Jong-un, completely abandon his arsenal without any reciprocal American concessions.

The president’s hint of flexibility came after North Korea declared last week that it would never agree to unilaterally surrender its weapons, even threatening to cancel the much-anticipated summit meeting between Mr. Kim and Mr. Trump scheduled for next month in Singapore.

A significant business partner of Michael D. Cohen, President Trump’s personal lawyer, has agreed to cooperate with the government as a potential witness, a development that could be used as leverage to pressure Mr. Cohen to work with the special counsel examining Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.

Under the deal reached with the New York attorney general’s office, the partner, Evgeny A. Freidman, a Russian immigrant who is known as the Taxi King, specifically agreed to assist government prosecutors in state or federal investigations, according to a person briefed on the matter.

The broadened scope of Mr. Freidman’s cooperation may prove worrisome not only to Mr. Cohen, who is the target of a continuing federal investigation, but also Mr. Trump.

The Environmental Protection Agency did something very concerning.

A security guard grabbed an @AP reporter and shoved her out of the EPA building when she tried to attend a meeting on water contaminants https://t.co/HizGgTrIcE

At the same time Elliott Broidy was cashing in on his access to President Trump by pitching him on behalf of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, he was also receiving the biggest payouts in the history of his company from the U.S. government.

Monday, the Associated Press reported on the months-long 2017 lobbying effort carried out by Broidy and George Nader that brought the pair close to securing nearly $1 billion in contracts with the Saudis and the Emiratis in exchange for lobbying against their enemy, Qatar. Also during the pair’s lobbying blitz in the fall of 2017, Broidy’s company received its largest payouts to date from the federal government on contracts it had been seeking to secure for years, The Daily Beast has learned.

The company, a Virginia-based security firm called Circinus LLC, is owned by Broidy and has secured at least $800 million in foreign defense contracts since Trump took office. All of those payouts came after Broidy reportedly worked his contacts in D.C.—including Trump—to advocate for positions favorable to the countries that Circinus now lists as clients.

Last week, the Senate Intelligence Committee agreed with the U.S. Intelligence Community’s conclusion that the Russian government interfered in the 2016 election with the intention to help elect Donald Trump. Today, the DHS Secretary claimed she wasn’t aware of this conclusion.

Woah —> DHS Sec. Nielsen said she hasn’t seen the Intelligence community report that claims Putin preferred President Donald Trump win the US election over Hillary Clinton.

“I don’t believe I’ve seen that conclusion. I’m not aware of that,” she said on the Hill.

The Trump administration is moving to reverse Obama-era rules barring hunters on some public lands in Alaska from baiting brown bears with bacon and doughnuts and using spotlights to shoot mother black bears and cubs hibernating in their dens.

In a case involving the rights of tens of millions of private sector employees, the U.S. Supreme Court, by a 5-4 vote, delivered a major blow to workers, ruling for the first time that workers may not band together to challenge violations of federal labor laws.

Writing for the majority, Justice Neil Gorsuch said that the 1925 Federal Arbitration Act trumps the National Labor Relations Act and that employees who sign employment agreements to arbitrate claims must do so on an individual basis — and may not band together to enforce claims of wage and hour violations.

Stacey Abrams made history.

Breaking News: History in Georgia: Stacey Abrams became the first black woman to be a major party’s nominee for governor after winning her Democratic primary https://t.co/y9jsLwUlcw

]]>https://rantt.com/rantt-rundown-dismantling-donald-trumps-narrative-about-the-fbi-informant/feed/019406Max Rose Is The First Post-9/11 Combat Vet To Seek Office In NYC — And He Might Winhttps://rantt.com/max-rose-is-the-first-post-9-11-combat-vet-to-seek-office-in-ny%e2%80%8a-%e2%80%8aand-he-might-win/
https://rantt.com/max-rose-is-the-first-post-9-11-combat-vet-to-seek-office-in-ny%e2%80%8a-%e2%80%8aand-he-might-win/#respondTue, 22 May 2018 19:43:28 +0000https://rantt.com/?p=19390From Serving His Country To Serving His Community

In special elections around the US, Democrats have flipped seats that Republicans previously won by double-digit margins. From Alabama to Pennsylvania, the trend has remained consistent. All the actionable data makes one thing clear: the Democratic wave is real. Max Rose aims to bolster it in New York’s 11th Congressional District (NY-11).

Max Rose is the first post-9/11 combat veteran to seek office in New York City. The Purple Heart and Bronze Star recipient also worked as the Chief of Staff of Brightpoint Health, which operates health clinics and substance abuse programs. Rose also worked for Brooklyn District Attorney Ken Thompson, and focused on rebuilding trust between the community and law enforcement. Even with a resume like Rose’s, there is a challenge ahead.

NY-11 is a tough district. In 2016, Republican incumbent Daniel Donovan won it by 25 points. Before Donovan assumed office, Republican Michael Grimm (who resigned after pleading guilty to felony tax evasion and subsequently serving time in prison) held the seat. Now that Grimm out of prison, the far-right candidate is challenging Donovan in the Republican primary. Believe it or not, polling indicates Grimm is the frontrunner.

Although Donovan’s margin of victory was large, he was facing a Democrat who had no significant backing. In 2012, Obama won this district by 5 points and in 2016, Donald Trump won it by just under 10 points. The Cook Partisan Voter Index has this district listed as an R+3.

Max Rose thinks he’s the best candidate to take on this challenge and close that gap in the general. Rose, who does not accept money from corporate PACs, has outraised his primary contenders and was named as one of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s “Red to Blue” candidates.

The primary election is on June 26, 2018.

From gun reform to healthcare, we spoke to Max Rose about where he stands on the issues. Read our full interview with him below:

I’m running for Congress because I’ve seen how broken our politics have become and I know we are capable of so much more. “In the army, men and women I served with did the impossible every day because that’s what our country asked them to do. I’m fed up with politicians who lack the commitment and courage to do the same.

After far too many soldiers were wounded or killed by IEDs in Afghanistan, Congress acted. In record time our Strykers were redesigned and I am alive today because of that. So, don’t tell me we can’t defeat the drug epidemic, rebuild our infrastructure, or get money out of politics. We’ve faced harder challenges before. We can do it again with new leadership in Congress.

You’re the first post-9/11 combat veteran to seek office in New York City. What specific skills do you think your experience in the military can bring to government?

The thing that stands out most in my mind when I think about my time as a combat platoon leader in Afghanistan, is that it didn’t matter whether the soldiers around me were Democrats or Republicans, gay or straight, dreamers or citizens. They just focused on their mission and did what their country asked of them, every single day. And it’s not just soldiers – teachers, nurses, firefighters, construction workers – so many people wake up every day and put it all on the line to keep this country moving. I think the House of Representatives should be filled with 435 people with that exact same attitude.

What do you think the nation’s top priority should be in the next five to ten years?

When you look at the challenges this country is facing, whether it’s the skyrocketing costs of healthcare, gun violence, or a crumbling infrastructure, they’re all incredibly important, to name just one legislative priority. But our biggest problem, is that none of these issues can be resolved if the people don’t have faith in the political process. Therefore, our top priority needs to be regaining the trust of the American people. That starts with reducing the role of big money in our politics and setting our government back on a path of responding to every day Americans, not donors and corporate lobbyists. That’s why I’m refusing to take a single cent from corporate PACs, not just in this campaign, but throughout my entire political career. It’s time to reform campaign finance laws, end Citizens United, and get government back on the side of the working class.

How do you plan to make healthcare more accessible to your constituents and what role do you think healthcare should play in tackling the opioid crisis?

Whether on Staten Island, in South Brooklyn, or anywhere else across the country we have to do go after the issues systematically to ensure not only that everyone is covered, but its done so in an affordable way. That’s why we need a public option in every county, so that no insurer has a monopoly. We need to enact all-payer rate setting nationwide, just as Maryland already did, so that the federal government can have the authority to negotiate the price of all medical services. And we need to invest more in primary and preventive care so that the healthcare industry can focus more on keeping us healthy, not treating us once we’re sick. With these basic steps, I think we can remove the industry’s perverse profit incentives, lower costs, and provide healthcare that is truly universal.

As for treating the opioid epidemic, we need a massive national commitment on par with what we saw in the fight against HIV/AIDS, and the healthcare industry must play a central role in that commitment. We need more outpatient clinics, like the one I helped Brightpoint Health bring to Staten Island. But my time at Brightpoint also showed me that there’s only so much outpatient clinics can do. We need more funding for inpatient treatment centers and greater investment in primary care and mental health services to prevent the root causes of addiction. With these investments, and with a greater focus from law enforcement on punishing the drug companies that floor our streets with pills, we can finally put an end to this epidemic.

What do you think about the GOP’s tax law and how it affects New Yorkers?

This bill targeted New York for punishment. End of story. It was a massive giveaway to corporations with some things for the middle and working class sprinkled in. But ten years from now, those small benefits for the middle class will all but disappear, while the wealthiest 1% of New Yorkers will continue to rake in 42% of the tax cut. That’s absurd. We need to repeal the bill and put an end to the tax loopholes like the carried interest loophole that both parties have propped up for years. Then, we need to work in a bipartisan manner to finally build a tax code that allows the middle-class to share in the wealth it helped to create.

As a combat veteran, you’ve likely worked closely with high-powered assault weapons. Do you believe that assault weapons should be available for purchase by civilians and what steps should the federal government take to reduce gun violence?

You’re exactly right, I carried an assault rifle every day in Afghanistan. I know that weapon intimately, and I can tell you that it is designed to do one thing, and one thing only: kill as many people as possible, as quickly as possible. It’s a weapon of war, and it absolutely does not belong on our streets. Period. But banning assault weapons is just one of many steps the federal government should take to reduce gun violence. We also need to update our background check laws so that all gun sales, including those occurring online or at gun shows, are subject to a background check. We have to go after illegal gun traffickers, close the Boyfriend Loophole that allows convicted domestic abusers to own a gun, and empower law enforcement to help those struggling with suicidal thoughts. This shouldn’t be controversial, it’s common sense, and it’s time we stood up to the NRA and actually got it done. The NRA is not going to give me an F rating, they’re going to give me an “F-you” rating.

I can’t tell you how many #NY11 parents answer the door with their kids by their side & say how scared they are to drop them off at school. Anyone who thinks in this election that the #NRA and the #GOP can get away with blocking action hasn’t spoken w/ the American people. pic.twitter.com/riSOhiRtnH

Conor Lamb’s PA special election was a prime example of how important it is to field candidates that fit the District. NY-11 is a tough one, with Republican incumbent Daniel Donovan having won it by 25 points. What did your campaign learn from the Lamb race when it comes to finding a way to close the gap ahead of you?

I come back to trust. Conor did a phenomenal job showing folks – who were rightfully pissed off at government ignoring and screwing them over – that he wouldn’t leave them behind. Authenticity matters. Trust matters. That’s what we do every day here on Staten Island and South Brooklyn and it’s why I think we’ll win.

Speaking of Donovan, his primary opponent Michael Grimm once represented NY-11 before pleading guilty to felony tax fraud. What do you think of the current state of the GOP?

I think it says more about how bad of an elected official Dan Donovan has been that Michael Grimm is the frontrunner now in their race. Let’s be honest here though: take aside Grimm’s eight-month stint in prison and they’re two sides of the same coin. They’ve taken hundreds of thousands of dollars from Corporate PACs over the course of their careers and they haven’t done a damn thing to solve our problems. Our commute? Still sucks. Opioid and heroin epidemic? Still killing people in my neighborhood. People are sick of it and that’s why I think you’re seeing folks across the country stand up and say, “Enough.”

How do you plan to appeal to both Staten Island and Brooklyn voters?

On Staten Island and in South Brooklyn we get the short end of the stick every time. The Mayor, who’s a Democrat, is the only elected official in the city not in favor of building a recreational facility that was promised to Staten Island’s North Shore almost a decade ago. It doesn’t even make sense. On the Brooklyn side, you don’t know how much hell of a commute you can have until you ride the R-Train five days a week to and from work. We need elected officials who will call politicians and the system out on their bullshit. If you do that and show a better way forward – you’re going to win.

Why should voters inNY-11vote for you over your primary opponents?

Because I’ve put in the work building the united front that we’re going to need to take this seat in November. I’ve personally knocked on thousands of doors, met with hundreds of community leaders, and I’m proud of the endorsements we’ve received, from the Working Families Party, to VoteVets, to the Congressional Black Caucus and the New York State Council of Machinists, and everything in between. All across country, people are starting to realize that our campaign has the energy, the enthusiasm, and the grassroots support that we need to take on our Republican opponent, whoever that may be. It may be my name on the ballot, but these are the people that are really going to lead us over the finish line in November, and I’m honored to have them behind me.

Over the weekend, President Trump ordered the Justice Department to investigate his political opponents, under the guise of seeking whether or not his campaign was wrongfully spied on (it wasn’t). This was clearly yet another attempt to undermine Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation and an abuse of power. But before we discuss that further, let’s dive into the story that appeared to trigger President Trump’s unhinged behavior.

On Saturday, a bombshell story from The New York Times was published on yet another Trump Tower meeting where the Trump campaign was open to help from foreign nationals. It revealed that in August 2016 (three months before the election) Donald Trump Jr. and now-White House Adviser Stephen Miller held a meeting at Trump Tower that indicates the campaign was willing to accept help from more foreign nations than just Russia…

Three months before the 2016 election, a small group gathered at Trump Tower to meet with Donald Trump Jr., the president’s eldest son. One was an Israeli specialist in social media manipulation. Another was an emissary for two wealthy Arab princes. The third was a Republican donor with a controversial past in the Middle East as a private security contractor.

The meeting was convened primarily to offer help to the Trump team, and it forged relationships between the men and Trump insiders that would develop over the coming months — past the election and well into President Trump’s first year in office, according to several people with knowledge of their encounters.

Erik Prince, the private security contractor and the former head of Blackwater, arranged the meeting, which took place on Aug. 3, 2016. The emissary, George Nader, told Donald Trump Jr. that the princes who led Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates were eager to help his father win election as president. The social media specialist, Joel Zamel, extolled his company’s ability to give an edge to a political campaign; by that time, the firm had already drawn up a multimillion-dollar proposal for a social media manipulation effort to help elect Mr. Trump.

The company, which employed several Israeli former intelligence officers, specialized in collecting information and shaping opinion through social media.

The piece goes on to say that Donald Trump Jr. “responded approvingly” to the offer but it wasn’t clear whether it was acted on. But it does indicate one of Zamel’s companies was paid after the election.

After Mr. Trump was elected, Mr. Nader paid Mr. Zamel a large sum of money, described by one associate as up to $2 million. There are conflicting accounts of the reason for the payment, but among other things, a company linked to Mr. Zamel provided Mr. Nader with an elaborate presentation about the significance of social media campaigning to Mr. Trump’s victory.

Zamel’s companies also have ties to two Russian Oligarchs that we are all too familiar with.

Companies connected to Mr. Zamel also have ties to Russia. One of his firms had previously worked for oligarchs linked to Mr. Putin, including Oleg V. Deripaska and Dmitry Rybolovlev, who hired the firm for online campaigns against their business rivals.

Mr. Deripaska, an aluminum magnate, was once in business with the former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, who has pleaded not guilty in the special counsel investigation to charges of financial crimes and failing to disclose the lobbying work he did on behalf of a former president of Ukraine, an ally of Mr. Putin. Mr. Rybolovlev once purchased a Florida mansion from Mr. Trump.

The Trump family has paid their way around the law their entire lives

I’m unsurprised at the lengths they are willing to go to win—no matter how illegal or unethical

Thus far they’ve bailed themselves out of consequences, so they believe they’re above the law

It’s important to note that Nader is reportedly cooperating with Robert Mueller’s investigation.

This came mere months after June 2016 Trump Tower meeting between Donald Trump Jr, Jared Kushner, then-Campaign Manager Paul Manafort, Natalia Veselnitskaya (a Russian lawyer and self-described informant), and Russian operatives. It revealed that Donald Trump Jr. was very eager about the prospect of receiving dirt on Hillary Clinton.

Federal law, Section 30121 of Title 52, states that it is a crime for a foreign national to contribute money or other items of value to an American election, as well as making it illegal for an American to solicit such a contribution.

After a year spent carefully cultivating two princes from the Arabian Peninsula, Elliott Broidy, a top fundraiser for President Donald Trump, thought he was finally close to nailing more than $1 billion in business.

…

Broidy and his business partner, Lebanese-American George Nader, pitched themselves to the crown princes [Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates] as a backchannel to the White House, passing the princes’ praise — and messaging — straight to the president’s ears.

…

In return for pushing anti-Qatar policies at the highest levels of America’s government, Broidy and Nader expected huge consulting contracts from Saudi Arabia and the UAE, according to an Associated Press investigation based on interviews with more than two dozen people and hundreds of pages of leaked emails between the two men. The emails reviewed by the AP included work summaries and contracting documents and proposals.

…

Summaries written by Broidy of two meetings he had with Trump — one of which has not been disclosed before — report that he was passing messages to the president from the two princes and that he told Trump he was seeking business with them.

Whether or not help was accepted from these various regimes, one thing is clear: President Trump has taken a very friendly stance with all of the nations who have reportedly offered to help his campaign.

Meanwhile…

So back to the demand that President Donald Trump made of the DOJ and his claim the informant spied on his campaign. Like much of what Trump says, that is not exactly true. Former FBI counterintelligence agent Asha Rangappa explains how the informant was not spying on the Trump campaign, but as part of the counterintelligence operation may have been trying to protect the campaign.

But Trump and his backers are wrong about what it means that the FBI reportedly was using a confidential source to gather information early in its investigation of possible campaign ties to Russia. The investigation started out as a counterintelligence probe, not a criminal one. And relying on a covert source rather than a more intrusive method of gathering information suggests that the FBI may have been acting cautiously — perhaps too cautiously — to protect the campaign, not undermine it.

So now we’ve cleared that up, it may explain why Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein responded to Trump’s order on Sunday by referring the manner to the DOJ’s Inspector General. Perhaps he’s very aware that the probe will find no wrongdoing. It’s also important to point out that Rosenstein’s response to Trump’s demand specified that it was indeed a counterintelligence investigation, further creating the distinction that Rangappa points out above.

Rosenstein, FBI Director Christopher Wray and Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats met with President Trump today. The President is officially involved in an investigation that he is a subject of. CNNreported:

Top officials at the Justice Department, the FBI and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence agreed Monday to share highly classified information with lawmakers related to the Russia investigation amid an escalating controversy over the bureau’s use of a confidential intelligence source during the 2016 presidential campaign.

White House press secretary Sarah Sanders said Monday that chief of staff John Kelly planned to “immediately” schedule a meeting with the officials and leaders of Congress to “review highly classified and other information they have requested.”

Politico reported a story that makes Trump’s claims that Hillary Clinton mishandled classified intelligence look even more hypocritical.

Trump uses a W.H. cell phone that isn’t equipped with sophisticated security features designed to shield his communications, two senior admin officials tell Politico.

]]>https://rantt.com/rantt-rundown-as-the-case-for-collusion-mounts-president-trump-intervenes/feed/019382A Preview Of Bipartisan Americahttps://rantt.com/a-preview-of-bipartisan-america/
https://rantt.com/a-preview-of-bipartisan-america/#respondMon, 21 May 2018 18:24:37 +0000https://rantt.com/?p=19323What would happen if we started debating how to solve our biggest problems in good faith again?

]]>A funny thing happened to Conor Lamb after he won PA-18, a district gerrymandered into being for the sole purpose of giving Republicans a safe seat in the House. Overnight, the former evil agent of Pelosi with anti-American, leftist values turned into a young Republican, according to Fox News and right-wing pundits. How? He campaigned as a disciplined moderate who saw the benefit of some conservative ideas and reaching across the aisle, which was enough for the GOP to start chanting “One of us! One of us!”

Now, it would be easy to dismiss this sentiment as the denial stage of grief by a party realizing that it’s been hijacked by Bircher extremists, has to navigate a rabid base that rejects its core principles for authoritarian populism, and is reviled by voters so much that many of their safest seats are no longer safe. “Oh sure he said he was a Democrat, but he was really just a conservative in a commie’s clothing and this nation is still in the midst of MAGA fever, despite every poll showing the exact opposite.”

But here’s the thing, Lamb and other candidates who will be successful in Republican districts won’t win because they embraced left-wing populism and ran on dismissing every idea from the right out of hand. They will be calm, reasonable moderates with a healthy respect for both workers’ rights and the free market, environmental protections and the need for jobs, the rights of gun owners and basic gun safety more than 8 out of 10 Americans support. In other words, they will be rational citizens trying to bring back a much-needed dose of sanity to our laws and national discourse.

Can you remember the last time the country could go on for months at a time without spinning into yet another possible constitutional crisis, threat of war, or a massive political scandal that was going to be dwarfed by the scandal we all know will come next week? Substantive policy debates on the Hill have been replaced by the crisis of the month while a rotating cavalcade of people—few have ever heard of until now—tease some major announcement that will supposedly change the world as we know it. If the political news cycle today was a TV show, it would be dismissed as too contrived and overly reliant on cheap surprises. And it’s an even worse way to run a country.

Based on a technique known as NOMINATE scoring, which groups lawmakers based on how often their votes overlap, we can see that the partisan divide in Congress started skyrocketing in the 1990s with the GOP moving farther to the right twice as fast as the Democratic Party moved to the left. As far as our representatives are concerned, there’s nothing they can agree on and the broad ideological overlaps of the 1970s between the most moderate Republicans and Democrats in the 1970s are a relic of the past when we look at the data for 2011 and 2012. In light of these facts, it’s an inevitability that our government is gridlocked and long term problems aren’t getting solved with comprehensive packages of reforms. Recall how Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) made it his life’s work to oppose anything suggested by the Obama Administration, insisting there was literally nothing he and the White House could agree on while rallying Congress’ most extreme members to torpedo bills.

This is why we so badly need rational adults in government, people educated on key policies and how the system actually works, and ready to do what we want politicians we elected to do: make bipartisan compromises that solve as many facets of pressing problems as possible. Meanwhile, we could take our eyes off the news and actually focus on living our lives without wondering if the next nightmarish blowup in D.C. will threaten our healthcare, economy, security, or individual rights every other hour, or step away to make a cup of coffee without coming back to another scandalous piece of breaking news.

In an atmosphere of constant partisan tribalism enforced by daily outrage, conspiracy theories, and scaremongering—especially from the GOP—it’s easy to forget what moderation or political centrism look like. It’s not blithely rejecting every idea from every party, espousing no beliefs or principles of your own to play Devil’s advocate and complaining about how everyone is awful. It’s also not trying to split the difference between two extremes and calling it a day. Saying that if the left wants a $15 an hour minimum wage and the right wants to do away with minimum wage altogether, we should just settle on $7.50 an hour isn’t bipartisan politics but simple-minded literalism.

No, political moderation means recognizing germs of good ideas regardless of their origin and helping them mature into useful policies after looking at the available data and informed debate. Today, the GOP rejects this approach as an anti-American conspiracy and specializes in bad faith negotiations meant to fail so they can claim they really tried the bipartisan approach. But those irrational America-and-God-hating liberals just wouldn’t agree to something as benign as, say, a Muslim internment camp, and therefore, Republicans must go it alone to save the republic from their Soros-funded Illuminati New World Order plot.

(Andrew Schultz/Unsplashed)

Before you ask, yes, I could come up with sarcastic remarks all day. But let’s set aside the question of how we could actually engage in bipartisanship and civil discourse, and instead, explore what that could look like in today’s world. What sorts of policies could we see if we just talked about them like rational adults? Believe it or not, despite receiving plenty of comments and hate mail calling me a socialist on a secret globalist payroll, the stances I’ve advocated here at Rantt are far from that side of the political spectrum, as evidenced by hate mail in which I‘m apparently a “corporate poverty pimp.”

For example, while noting that refugees are statistically highly unlikely to be terrorists, treating all of them like ticking time bombs will work against assimilating them and segregating them is why so many European countries are having generations worth of resentment boiling over, I also said that no country can or should be expected to take infinite refugees. They should be allowed to only let in as many as they feel they can help find work and build a new life. Inviting those who we cannot accommodate does neither us nor the refugees any favors, draining the natives’ wallets and good will, and trapping many refugees in a country they don’t know, with dwindling prospects to fully assimilate, and in a volatile legal limbo.

Similarly, I think that a point system for immigration like ones used in many countries is a good idea, as are merit-based evaluations of an applicant for a green card. Currently, the process is vague, opaque, and expensive, so clear guidelines and criteria would be helpful to would-be immigrants and save taxpayer money. Likewise, merit-based initiatives for green cards could help highly qualified immigrants from getting stuck in unskilled jobs. (I say all this as an immigrant and refugee myself.) My problems with the GOP proposals for both were the vicious, clearly racist criteria which amounted to placing a “Millionaire Whites Only” sign on the application forms, the cruelty of not letting immigrants stay with their families, and implying that a nation of over 325 million people can’t accommodate any refugees at all.

Likewise, we should be questioning whether the H1-B visas, which bring as many as 65,000 foreign workers to the U.S. every year, primarily in the tech industry, are being abused at the expense of Americans. For nearly a decade, we’ve known that more than one in five H1-B applications contain fraudulent information. Stories of H1-B workers lacking the skills they claimed or listing eight years of experience with tools that have only been around for five are a staple of almost every tech workplace. Scams involving these visas are a nearlyconstantoccurrence, and studies which claim that American workers are simply not up to par compared to their Asian peers are suspect at best, and deliberately misleading at worst.

Reforms to visa programs like this are sorely needed. We absolutely want to allow highly skilled workers to come to America and make contributions to our scientific, engineering, and medical programs, but we want to make sure they’re not coming to the country under false pretenses while displacing our current, perfectly adequate workforce. The H1-B system was designed to help companies find the best and brightest around the world, not to cut costs by replacing employees they think are too expensive, and facilitate con artists dealing in exaggerated resumes filled with outright lies.

And speaking of mass immigration, looking further into the reasons why Europe is in the middle of a refugee crisis, we can see that the nasty effects of climate change and weak governance in failing states are sending millions of people fleeing their homelands. The better solution isn’t just to build walls and deport as many migrants as we can, then hope they won’t come back, but to help develop these nations. While at first glance, this may sound like the very worst sort of wasteful globalism, the idea I proposed noted that existing charitable projects have failed from neglect and arbitrary, unstable funding, and our best course lies with private industry.

Forget carbon taxes which allow corporations to effortlessly greenwash the environmental damage they cause and consultants throwing money into feel-good projects that look good in the news but very seldom, if ever, have lasting effects. Instead, we should be thinking about how to efficiently build modern infrastructures from scratch and getting in on the ground floors of developing economies now that ours is mature and can only grow so fast and in relatively few sectors at that without branching out to radical new opportunities.

Render of SpaceX’s proposed Interplanetary Transport System on a launchpad

Basically, the argument is to replace top-down planning by immense non-profits, NGOs, and government agencies with new, groundbreaking startups with big solutions to serious problems, given seed investments by nations in whose best interest it is to help control the effects of mass migration, and working alongside non-profits that know the local terrain, both political and physical. It’s trying to harness the power of capitalism to fight climate change and giving potential refugees a good reason to stay home and improve their countries instead, while creating jobs in mature economies which would do the heavy lifting in research, development, ancillary and support services, and monetizing promising spinoffs.

The same can be said for the future of space exploration. I would argue that governments can and should create a launchpad for private industry so we can reap sustained and long-term benefits from growing our economy and civilization into the final frontier, but we couldn’t — and shouldn’t — rely on their constant involvement, which depends on the whims of opportunistic and fickle politicians with a very shaky track record in supporting science. Forget the post-capitalist utopias of Star Trek and The Orville. Our future as a species has to expand into space and that feat has to be powered by our capitalistic tendencies, funding long-term, stable missions to discover, invent, and share the wonders of the universe for a hefty profit.

If it sounds like I’m — gasp — envisioning a smaller government with less of a direct role in our lives going forward, you’re hearing me right. For Team MAGA, it may be unthinkable that those who disagree with them don’t want a giant nanny state which will one day enslave us all under a brutal collectivist dictatorship, as I’m told was detailed by Agenda 21. But it’s entirely possible to have nuanced opinions about gun rights, regulations, immigration, and the economy that don’t fit in a tweet or on a hat. This is why I argue for a smaller but smarter government, with modernized agencies that focus on providing basic, streamlined services, and leave the rest to private industry, which will compete to provide us the best solutions for complex, new problems.

Consider that we absolutely need to make sure everyone can afford healthcare because our current system is financially crippling us and produces wildly unequal medical outcomes which depend on where you’re employed and how generous your insurance plan is. This also means we continually lose out on entrepreneurs who can’t start a business because they won’t be able to afford to get sick or have an accident, or have workers coming in sick and getting sicker because a doctor’s visit is too expensive, spreading disease to co-workers in similar straits. And this is not to mention how punitively expensive it’s become to have a child in America.

But instead of simply turning Medicare as it is into a universal health system and blithely ignoring the huge costs and treatment gaps that will result, we should insist on a second, private layer to come up with innovative solutions, treatments, and medications. We also need to reform the patent system and existing laws to force currently bloated, oligopolistic entities to actually compete with each other and their counterparts in other developed nations, as well as face negotiations with government agencies which will buy their products in bulk. This approach can save us hundreds of billions when supplying new devices and drugs.

And places where Americans can find common ground don’t end here. Yes, the idea that too many people are going to college because all they need to do is learn a trade that worked well for the person saying it, or because colleges are supposedly bastions of Marxist brainwashing, is absurd. However, we could argue that too many people go to college because colleges haven’t caught up with the demands of the modern job market and employers are demanding totally unreasonable qualifications for too many jobs.

Education itself is great, and yes, education for the sake of education is noble, but the fact of the matter is that nearly three-quarters of Americans either don’t need a degree to do their jobs, or their current degrees are completely irrelevant. In this light, the frequent complaints of companies about the lack of qualified workers seem particularly asinine when they demand a four-year degree to modify spreadsheets and scan files for close to minimum wage with virtually no benefits, all while calling this “competitive” in their seemingly satirical, but sadly not, job postings.

As hard as it may be for way too many people to accept, the world of being able to clock in for 40 hours a week, do a job in which all your duties are scripted to the last detail, then retire somewhere warmer after 30 years, are gone. The jobs of the future aren’t 9 to 5 and require flexibility, creativity, and being ready to learn and make big changes quickly because the market moves faster than ever. Yet the current administration pretends that we still live in a late 19th-century agrarian and manufacturing economy instead of a global 21st-century post-industrial one with truly global competition.

We cannot rest on our past laurels and pretend the last 70 years of unprecedented growth and development across the world didn’t happen, or that modern technology isn’t upending half a century of predictable 9-to-5-30-years-then-retirement cadence of our working lives. We have to roll up our sleeves and out-innovate our economic rivals while boldly tackling our problems head-on. Just like Olympic champions have to keep training and competing to keep winning gold, we can’t lounge around between events then blame other competitors for cheating when they actually show up and put in the effort we refused to. We must also realize the economy and culture are not zero-sum games unless we choose for them to be, and there are scenarios that can have more than one winner with plenty of benefits for everyone involved.

And this gets to the heart of the problem we’re facing. We just zipped through topics as diverse as immigration, trade, healthcare, size of the government, space exploration, college, and found possible agreements on how we can merge ideas from the right and the left based on either looking at available data, or trying to learn lessons from plans that failed in the past. But these possible solutions require us to have a shared reality and the same set of facts. When the president and his followers tune into an alternative universe that exists solely to manufacture new crises for them and provide scapegoats for their problems, this simply isn’t possible.

They have very clear ideas for what they want to do but most of them are based on a world that doesn’t exist, one made of half-remembered outrage fuel and anger at their friends, neighbors, co-workers, and children for being “anti-American traitors.” Until we can somehow shake them out of their self-induced temper tantrum, we’re not going to get many sane solutions that can work based on actual facts, not tweets with the word “facts” added to them in all caps and followed by multiple exclamation points. We don’t need a party or a movement trying to “rescue America” from adapting to the modern world and planning for what’s next.

We need sober, level-headed adults, and the fact that only a handful of GOP members are willing to be such adults and act as a check on the ever-growing stable of rabid warmongers, white supremacists, xenophobes, and conspiracy theorists in the White House is terrifying. Also unsettling is the push by the far left to shift the Democratic Party far more to the left than it wants to go, and actively trying to sabotage moderate candidates. If we’re going to survive as a global superpower and address real problems, not the ones clueless pundits frothing at the mouth are screaming about, we’re either going to need a lot more moderates, or vote extremists out as decisively as possible.

]]>https://rantt.com/a-preview-of-bipartisan-america/feed/019323The Mysterious Creation Of Moneyhttps://rantt.com/the-mysterious-creation-of-money/
https://rantt.com/the-mysterious-creation-of-money/#respondMon, 21 May 2018 00:29:17 +0000https://rantt.com/?p=19286As politicians consider changes to Dodd-Frank, do they understand the most basic functions of a bank in the economy - the creation of money?

This is the second in a series on how banking works. You can read the first on capital adequacy as the basis for bank stability here.

In 2008, we saw that banks in all major countries had the potential to fail, bring down our entire economic system, and eliminate confidence in the nation’s currencies. The U.S. was no exception. Back to barter was a little extreme—but not beyond possibility. The Government felt extorted into helping banks. Regulators began the search for the Goldilocks rule that would stop banks from being too big to bully us into bailouts.

In 1988 the central bankers, of mainly the G-20 countries, had anticipated the need for a global standard for bank stability resulting in the first of the Basel Accords. I explained Basel I in my first article in this series. The bankers founded their prescription for better bank health on a concept called “capital adequacy”. Geeks who want a more in-depth exposition can read this by economist Stephen Matteo Miller on the Fin Reg Rag.

To simplify, capital adequacy meant the bank had to have sufficient reserves of capital to meet all of its obligations as they came due—if loans to customers were not repaid as expected. But here’s the kicker, banks have the usual operational expenses of an ordinary business: employee wages, taxes and such. However, they also have a unique obligation because they are the frontline creators of money in any economy. So let’s first look at the role commercial banks play in this near alchemical process of bringing money into being.

Money Out Of Nothing

In 1975 in his insightful book, Money Whence it Came — Where it Went, John Kenneth Galbraith warned:

The study of money, above all other fields in economics, is one in which complexity is used to disguise truth or to evade truth, not to reveal it.

Thirty-eight years later (2013), the former head of the British financial regulator, Lord Adair Turner observed that the general understanding of money creation was still based on the myth that banks make their profit by paying a low rate of interest on deposits and lending that money out at a higher rate. Not so, he said, but rather:

“Banks do not, as too many textbooks still suggest, take deposits of existing money from savers and lend it out to borrowers: they create credit and money ex nihilo — extending a loan to the borrower and simultaneously crediting the borrower’s money account.”

Let’s take a look at the origins of this unique business of banking.

There are several versions of how banking was discovered. Some mainstream financial historians credit it to jewelers, then-called goldsmiths. They downplay the role of the alternative possibility, the more curious and colorful Knights Templar, the mysterious group so popular in B movies and video games.

No historian telling their account today was there, so I will tell the version that uses the Knights to demonstrate how modern money may have been invented.

Our valiant warriors recognized that peace was more profitable than war. They quickly made a treaty with the legendary Saladin, opening the way for branches throughout Europe and the Middle East.

The Knights had discovered something about money. It was not using paper to represent money. That was far from the genius of banking. The Knights had devised a way to make money out of nothing (only a slight exaggeration).

In those far-off days, there were no police. There were lots of wars, lots of desperate wandering mercenaries and wealthy people with lots of/piles of gold in their homes. Home invasions were inevitable. A vault was no security against a knife at the owner’s throat, but no mercenary would dare attack the elite fighting force of the era. The 1% of the day asked the Templars to store their gold and got a receipt.

The local Knight commander’s receipt might say something like this:

“Received from Guy Duchenne, Merchant, of Paris, one (1) bar of gold. Dated at Paris this 13th day of October in the year of our Lord 1307.

Jacques DeMolay, Grand Master, Paris Encampment”

An observant Templar noticed something peculiar — the wealthy rarely wanted their gold. They preferred to exchange the paper receipts signed by a Templar grand master with each other. Even better, a Paris merchant could travel to Damascus. If in need of a new camel costing one bar of gold, he could go to the Templar encampment in Damascus, present the receipt, and get a bar of gold to give to Sayid the camel seller.

However, Sayid also preferred the paper note. So the merchant wrote, “Pay to Sayid of Damascus” on the back and got his camel.

Nobody wanted the real thing.

Our medieval financial genius may have reasoned: If nobody wants to lug the heavy bars around, how does anyone know there is enough gold in our vault to honor the demands? They trust the paper.

Thus, our intrepid Templar watched. Depositors only ever asked to withdraw 10% of the vault contents. In the greatest “aha” moment in financial history, he understood that the Knights could issue receipts as loans for 10 times more gold than they had and get paid back in real gold — or goods and services.

The Templars transformed from warriors and warehousemen to bankers, creating money out of nothing.

The medieval mastermind saw that it was a confidence game. The key was to always have enough metal on hand, go into the vault and instantly hand over whatever was required.

There is a side lesson in politics here: Be careful who you deal with. The Knights Templar became too successful. They lent large sums to powerful people. Kings and popes felt threatened by the Knights’ success in finance and the mega debt owed to them. Finally, Philip of France and Pope Clement V conspired, trapped its grandmaster, and had him burned at the stake — a few piles of wood being cheaper than loan repayments. With his last words, Jacques DeMolay summoned Philip and the Pope to a higher court before the year was out. Both died within the year. The day Jacques was burned: Friday the 13th — still considered an inauspicious day to do a deal.

The Gold Standard Goes

The once necessary look for a bank

Why gold backing our money? In a famine, you can’t eat it; in a war, you can’t make weapons out of it. You can’t even make a warm blanket of it. However, in the most desperate times, when currency devalues to useless, someone will give you something for it.

Why? You can make jewelry out of it. The value of gold is founded on vanity. What is the more durable basis for money: a human virtue or a human weakness? Obviously, our currency was founded on a reliable human quality.

For hundreds of years, bank notes (an old term) stated, “Will pay to the bearer on demand one dollar in gold.” Bank buildings looked like a meld of fortress and mansion, leaving no doubt as to their strength.

Convertible to gold on demand

Many economic disasters, including the Great Depression, were blamed wholly or in part on restricting a country’s money supply to how many pieces of gold it happened to have. By the 1930s, most countries had abandoned the promise of converting paper currency to gold. People adjusted. They had gotten one bubble gum for one penny during the gold standard days, and they still got one-for-one afterward.

As consumer confidence grew, and customers began to trust banks over their mattresses, bank buildings changed to look like retail stores in shopping plazas. Currency deleted any mention of gold, changing to “legal tender.” There is no promise of anything; it baldly recites an amount. There is no longer a need for more: In banks we trust.

It’s a different story today

Experience confirmed that all our money system needed was a way to maintain confidence. Gold backing was not necessary. Economists introduced a new name for our money under the archaic Latin for “a decree from above ” — a “fiat” currency. As long as customers got a physical dollar when they asked for one, the system survived.

By the way, in the Middle Ages, the financier elite understood that “belief” (from the Latin creditum, hence “credit”) was the essence of a new idea for a better medium of exchange.

Modern Money-Making

Old Mac Donald, who, as we all know, had a farm, decides he wants to expand it. The bank approves his business plan and lends him $100,000 by entering that amount on a ledger. As the good farmer sells his pigs, purchasers pay with checks that he deposits against his loan until it is paid off — a perfect banking transaction involving only notional money: no hard currency.
In more contemporary terms, it could all be done by e-transactions, mere blips on a computer screen.

From our barnyard lesson, we learn that modern money may sometimes be nothing but notations on bank records. Its acceptance is an act of true faith. We can deduce a few further principles:

Money is not the cash in our wallets.

Money is created by loans.

There never was gold backing most of our currency.

Private sector retail banks, not governments, generate most of our money supply at first instance.

In the beginning, banks continued this process of creating money by making loans. They followed the Templar practice of keeping a reserve, then of the depositors’ money in cash. If any depositor walked into the bank and demanded money on deposit back, the teller had a stash of depositor cash to hand over. In today’s terms, ATMs must spit out $20 bills without fail. Because banks only had to keep a fraction of hard money on hand, it was called “the fractional reserve system.” No one knows why this 10% quantity works, but it is as close to a natural law in banking as we have.

U.S. banks with more than $122.3 million in transactions are required to keep a 10% reserve against deposits.

So what’s backing the dollar today as you read this? Fragile confidence.

Zombie Banks

Sounds great, this business of banking, doesn’t it? Need money yourself, just create it. The hitch is that money is created by making loans which necessitates lowering lending standards. Recall that the government does not impose lending standards on banks, but trusts them to do their own risk management. So bankers can lend to whoever they want. There is no regulation preventing that.

That brings us back to the idea that there has to be some control on banks creating money. The Basel Committee decided that ‘capital adequacy’ would do the trick. The banks could not make more loans than they had an adequate amount of a certain type of reliable capital to back up that loan if it was not repaid.

But, when the 2008 Crisis hit, the banks were declared, “zombie banks” that could not make loans. Then Treasury Secretary, Hank Paulson, said banks were solvent, and that they could pay their debts as they became due. However, they had to dip into their capital to do so. Thus, they did not have enough left to make loans. Paulson justified giving the bailout money to the banks (capitalizing the banks) so they could continue to make loans and keep the economy going.

Of course, the Fed has a role in controlling the money supply. However, its role is well explained on many sites online. I recommend Investopedia’s blurb. I discuss/mention only the role of capital adequacy here as it is far less understood.

The Fearsome Derivative

We aren’t finished yet. We need to understand the instrument bankers used (and are using) to fool policymakers, regulators, and most economists into believing the banking system was AAA safe until it wasn’t: the derivative — Credit Default Swaps, Structured Instruments, CDOs and the like. Michael Moore did an excellent job in showing how even experts in the financial system, including prominent Harvard economist Kenneth Rogoff, could not explain what they are. A must see clip is available on YouTube.

They aren’t that hard to understand and I’ll explain them in my next article.

For more on the little-understood laws that continue to allow the transfer of wealth and power follow me on:

]]>1 year into Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election and we’ve seen 75 charges filed against 22 people or companies, 5 guilty pleas, 1 person sentenced, and countless attempts by President Trump to obstruct it.

69 weeks into the Trump presidency and it’s becoming increasingly difficult to keep up with this administration’s tangled web of corruption, lies, scandals, investigations, and erosion of democratic norms. ‬From the Russia investigation to the probe into Trump’s “fixer” Michael Cohen, there are so many lines of inquiries some details can fall through the cracks.

This is why Rantt Media documents it all.

Each week brings a torrent of new developments, but the patterns remain the same:

New reports on the state of the investigations that seem to increase Trump and his associates’ likelihood of legal exposure.

New reports on the Trump campaign’s eagerness to accept assistance from foreign nationals offering to help push Donald Trump into the Oval Office.

New schemes in President Trump and House Republicans’ coordinated effort to undermine the investigations plaguing the White House.

New foreign policy blunders due to President Trump’s bluster and new moves that appear to be motivated by the interests of the Trump Organization, not the interests of the United States.

New immigration policy proposals and rhetoric that seek to dehumanize immigrants.

New heightened authoritarian rhetoric and attacks on the media.

New acts of gun violence that rob young people of their future.

Different news. Same patterns.

Stay vigilant.

69th Weekend (May 12-13)

President Trump during his State of the Union address in the chamber of the U.S. House of Representatives January 30, 2018 in Washington, DC. (AP)

In typical Trump administration fashion, the White House is more concerned about the leak exposing their indecency than the indecency itself.

NEW: At yesterday’s meeting of the White House comms team, a visibly upset and furious Sarah Sanders told the group: “I am sure this conversation is going to leak, too. And that’s just disgusting.” Here’s what happened next, per 5 sources in the room: https://t.co/RWVqgtXqpL

President Xi of China, and I, are working together to give massive Chinese phone company, ZTE, a way to get back into business, fast. Too many jobs in China lost. Commerce Department has been instructed to get it done!

The message of Trump’s ZTE tweet at the same time he is re-imposing Iran sanctions is that US companies who violate sanctions with Iran will be punished. Chinese companies who do will be let off the hook. America first!

Day 480: Monday, May 14

Deadly Optics

On Monday, Palestinian protestors were violently killed and injured on the Gaza strip…all while the Trump administration celebrated the opening of the U.S embassy in Jerusalem merely miles away. The New York Timesreported:

More than 2,700 Palestinian demonstrators were injured on Monday — at least 1,350 by gunfire — along the border fence with Gaza, the Health Ministry reported. The mass protests began on March 30 and had already left dozens dead.

The latest protests took place as the United States Embassy was formally relocated to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv, on the 70th anniversary of the formation of Israel. The formality and celebration created an almost surreal contrast to the violence raging barely 40 miles away.

The images were striking.

BREAKING: Death toll rises to at least 37 as Israeli forces open fire on rock-slinging Palestinians during border clashes ahead of US Embassy opening in Jerusalem, Gaza Health Ministry says. pic.twitter.com/XTEXub7jPQ

National security adviser John Bolton on Sunday carefully doubled down on President Donald Trump’s threat that European countries could be sanctioned by the United States if they continue to be involved with Iran.

“It’s possible,” Bolton said during an interview on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

Bolton’s statement came as he and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo tried to amplify the reasons behind the Trump administration’s deal to withdraw from the Iran nuclear agreement and explain how it will work, given that the international community, other than Israel and some Arab nations, has not jumped on board with the president. Both Bolton and Pompeo suggested they believed the major European powers might eventually see the light.

Scott Pruitt’s EPA and the White House sought to block publication of a federal health study on a nationwide water-contamination crisis, after one Trump administration aide warned it would cause a “public relations nightmare,” newly disclosed emails reveal.

The intervention early this year — not previously disclosed — came as HHS’ Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry was preparing to publish its assessment of a class of toxic chemicals that has contaminated water supplies near military bases, chemical plants and other sites from New York to Michigan to West Virginia.

A former senior campaign and transition aide to President Donald Trump recently inked a deal to help a Russian oligarch’s conglomerate shed sanctions the Trump administration slapped on them last month.

Bryan Lanza, who is in regular contact with White House officials, is lobbying on behalf of the chairman of EN+ Group, an energy and aluminum firm presently controlled by Oleg Deripaska, according to several sources. Deripaska is a billionaire who is close to Russian President Vladimir Putin and was the target of US sanctions imposed last month. Lanza was a CNN political contributor but is no longer with the network.

Day 481: Tuesday, May 15

Trump First, America Last

On Sunday, Donald Trump, the self-proclaimed MAGA/America First President, sent out a tweet that took many by surprise. Trump signaled that he was going to help Chinese tech company ZTE “get back in business.” Yes, that’s the same company who was banned from doing business in the US for violating sanctions and the NSA, FBI, and CIA believes tried to use their technology to spy on American consumers.

It was a mystery to many, but recent revelations reveal more about what may be one of the factors driving his decision…

A mere 72 hours after the Chinese government agreed to put a half-billion dollars into an Indonesian project that will personally enrich Donald Trump, the president ordered a bailout for a Chinese-government-owned cellphone maker.

“President Xi of China, and I, are working together to give massive Chinese phone company, ZTE, a way to get back into business, fast,” Trump announced on Twitter Sunday morning. “Too many jobs in China lost. Commerce Department has been instructed to get it done!”

Trump did not mention in that tweet or its follow-ups that on Thursday, the developer of a theme park resort outside of Jakarta had signed a deal to receive as much as $500 million in Chinese government loans, as well as another $500 million from Chinese banks, according to Agence France-Presse. Trump’s family business, the Trump Organization, has a deal to license the Trump name to the resort, which includes a golf course and hotels.

As Heather Long of The Washington Post notes, this was an odd move, even if you try and rationalize it in the context of trade negotiations and upcoming North Korea talks, all it does is give China unnecessary leverage. This raises the question of whether or not these loans influenced President Trump’s decision-making. If that’s the case, this fits a pattern.

The Trump presidency is plagued with unethical behavior of this nature, sparking numerous lawsuits and condemnation from ethics watchdogs.

What makes these moves so concerning is the foreign emoluments clause of the constitution, which prohibits gifts from foreign nations. The Founding Fathers foresaw a scenario where a President’s business interests might influence the manner in which they conduct foreign policy. Which is why past Presidents have placed their businesses in blind trusts so that they would not be swayed by their business entanglements. Even Jimmy Carter placed his peanut farm in a blind trust. Trump did not.

Despite calls for President Trump, a self-proclaimed billionaire, to place his business interests in a blind trust, Trump decided to place his interest in a trust that is run by his sons. Worse yet, the trust allows for President Trump to tap into profits whenever he sees fit and he’s still reportedly received regular updates on the performance of the Trump Organization. Long story short: Donald Trump has been able to profit from his actions as President of the United States.

Donald Trump’s lawyer, Michael Cohen, is facing claims he asked a Middle Eastern official for millions of dollars to give to ‘Trump family members’ in a meeting at Trump Tower weeks after the president’s election victory, DailyMail.com can reveal.

Cohen is alleged to have asked Ahmed Al-Rumaihi, a former diplomat in charge of a $100bn Qatari investment fund, to send ‘millions’ through him to Trump family members. A source told DailyMail.com that the Qatari said he refused.

North Korea threatened to call off Kim Jong Un’s summit with President Trump over joint military drills with the US and South Korea. And then, came this:

They went on to say they reject a “Libya-style denuclearization.” That was in response to National Security Adviser John Bolton’s rhetoric, which said the administration was going for the “Libya model” with North Korea. Libya’s dictator ended up murdered by his own people.

The Trump administration is preparing to implement an inhumane immigration policy. The Washington Postreported:

The Trump administration is making preparations to hold immigrant children on military bases, according to Defense Department communications, the latest sign the government is moving forward with plans to split up families who cross the border illegally.

According to an email notification sent to Pentagon staffers, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) will make site visits at four military installations in Texas and Arkansas during the next two weeks to evaluate their suitability to shelter children.

The bases would be used for minors under 18 who arrive at the border without an adult relative or after the government has separated them from their parents. HHS is the government agency responsible for providing minors with foster care until another adult relative can assume custody.

After CIA nominee Gina Haspel sent a letter to Senator Mark Warner (D-VA) stating that she believes “the enhanced interrogation program is not one the CIA should have undertaken,” Warner backed her nomination. Alabama Senator Doug Jones (D) on the other hand, is a no.

The cybersecurity role that John Bolton was trying to eliminate last week was eliminated. Politicoreported:

The Trump administration has eliminated the White House’s top cyber policy role, jettisoning a key position created during the Obama presidency to harmonize the government’s overall approach to cybersecurity policy and digital warfare.

The White House tried to blame the deaths of over 50 Palestinians on propaganda. HuffPostreported:

Britain, France and Germany have all called for Israel to exercise restraint after Monday’s bloodshed near the Gaza border. But the Trump administration has declined to hold Israel accountable for the violence, saying that the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas was to blame.

“The responsibility for these tragic deaths rests squarely with Hamas,” White House spokesman Raj Shah told reporters at a press briefing on Monday, referring to the 58 Palestinians who were killed by Israeli forces.

Day 482: Wednesday, May 16

Hush

Donald Trump and his son Donald Trump, Jr. at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Wednesday, July 20, 2016. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke)

To say that Wednesday was a wild news day would be an understatement. We have a lot to cover, but we’ll start with President Trump’s potentially criminal financial disclosure.

As we mentioned in Tuesday’s coverage, the Office of Government Ethics received President Trump’s annual financial disclosure form, and the details won’t surprise you if you’ve been listening to Trump’s legal counsel Rudy Giuliani.

The disclosure admitted that President Trump reimbursed his fixer Michael Cohen between $100,000 and $250,000 for costs associated with his $130,000 hush money payment to Stephanie Clifford (Stormy Daniels).

This was a fact that was omitted from Trump’s initial disclosure. That’s against the law. NBC Newsreported:

The acting director of the ethics office, David J. Apol, concluded that Trump’s report “meets the disclosure requirements,” but noted that making that debt public “is required.” The outside group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington had filed a complaint that Trump’s 2017 form had improperly omitted a “loan” from Cohen.

Federal law requires White House officials, including the president, to “report liabilities owed to any creditor that exceeded $10,000 at any time during the reporting period.” It is illegal to “knowingly and willfully” omit or falsify information on disclosure forms, a crime punishable by a fine and up to one year in prison.

Last year, Trump did not disclose any debts to Cohen…

This was referred to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein.

Judging by this letter from the OGE to Deputy AG Rod Rosenstein, it appears Donald Trump has just effectively received his first criminal referral as President. pic.twitter.com/1P3wm6aMzy

Whether or not this will yield any consequences is yet to be seen. But one thing is very clear: Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation, the Southern District of New York’s Cohen corruption investigation, and the countless ethical issues beleaguering this administration are beginning to pile up.

Meanwhile…

The Senate Judiciary Committee released 2,500 pages of testimony that gave more insight into the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting between Donald Trump Jr, Jared Kushner, then-Campaign Manager Paul Manafort, Natalia Veselnitskaya (a Russian lawyer and self-described informant), and Russian operatives. It revealed just how eager Donald Trump Jr. was about the prospect of receiving dirt on Hillary Clinton, and quite a few other revelations as well. Not only did Donald Trump Jr. allegedly open up the meeting with the words “I believe you have some information for us,” he told the Committee that he was disappointed that he didn’t receive the information he was looking for. Federal law, Section 30121 of Title 52, states that it is a crime for a foreign national to contribute money or other items of value to an American election, as well as making it illegal for an American to solicit such information. But that wasn’t all that was revealed.

Question: “What was the ‘it’ that you loved in that e-mail?”
Trump Jr: “Potential information about an opponent.” pic.twitter.com/495f2Xnm49

Trump Jr. admitted that Trump shaped his statement about the Trump Tower meeting through Hope Hicks, and said that she asked him if he wanted to speak directly with Trump. He declined because he “didn’t want to bring” his father into “something he had nothing to do with.” pic.twitter.com/WVJNQ3kGnq

Senate Judiciary Democrats: “In its investigation so far, the Committee has found evidence of multiple contacts between the Trump campaign and Russian government officials or their intermediaries, including offers of assistance and purported overtures from Vladimir Putin.” pic.twitter.com/fXPsBjzypl

The Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee broke with their sycophantic counterparts in the House. CNNreported:

The Senate Intelligence Committee’s leaders said Wednesday they believed that the intelligence community’s 2017 assessment of election meddling was correct, breaking with Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee who questioned the conclusion that the Russians were trying to help President Donald Trump get elected.

“There is no doubt that Russia undertook an unprecedented effort to interfere with our 2016 election,” Senate Intelligence Chairman Richard Burr, a North Carolina Republican, said in a statement. “Committee staff have spent 14 months reviewing the sources, tradecraft, and analytic work, and we see no reason to dispute the conclusions.”

In a win for internet freedom, the Senate passed a bill that would reinstate net neutrality. Now, on to the House.

The Daily Beast reported on a new line of inquiry into the NRA.

“The Committee has obtained a number of documents that suggest the Kremlin used the National Rifle Association as a means of accessing and assisting Mr. Trump and his campaign.” https://t.co/U9CuxUHFTa

U.S. Justice Department Special Counsel Robert Mueller has issued two subpoenas to a social media expert who worked for longtime Donald Trump adviser Roger Stone during the 2016 presidential election campaign.

…

According to sources familiar with the ongoing investigation, Mueller also has been probing whether anyone associated with the Trump campaign may have helped Assange or the Russians time or target the release of hacked emails and other social media promoting Trump or critical of Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton.

The New York Times published an in-depth look at the early days of the Russia investigation and also, for the first time, acknowledged their botched reporting.

Big NYT piece on FBI handling of Trump campaign investigation notes that law enforcement officials expressed caution to NYT reporters in Oct 2016 and their resulting story “significantly played down the case.” https://t.co/BespudJorEpic.twitter.com/3gTPm3ZAd3

Last week, several news outlets obtained financial records showing that Michael Cohen, President Trump’s personal attorney, had used a shell company to receive payments from various firms with business before the Trump Administration. In the days since, there has been much speculation about who leaked the confidential documents, and the Treasury Department’s inspector general has launched a probe to find the source. That source, a law-enforcement official, is speaking publicly for the first time, to The New Yorker, to explain the motivation: the official had grown alarmed after being unable to find two important reports on Cohen’s financial activity in a government database. The official, worried that the information was being withheld from law enforcement, released the remaining documents.

The payments to Cohen that have emerged in the past week come primarily from a single document, a “suspicious-activity report” filed by First Republic Bank, where Cohen’s shell company, Essential Consultants, L.L.C., maintained an account. The document detailed sums in the hundreds of thousands of dollars paid to Cohen by the pharmaceutical company Novartis, the telecommunications giant A.T. & T., and an investment firm with ties to the Russian oligarch Viktor Vekselberg.

The whistleblower who leaked Michael Cohen’s financial records is stepping forward to say why: records of bigger, potentially more sensitive, swaths of suspicious transactions appeared to be missing from a government database. My @newyorker investigation: https://t.co/5nR2CHNOUc

Ok, this time for real, here’s a reassuring note from FiveThirtyEight on yesterday’s primary elections.

The Democratic Party woke up this morning with a clear signal from Tuesday’s primary elections: The #Resistance means business. The more progressive candidate won in Democratic primaries around the country. The question, however, is whether those more liberal candidates will hurt the party’s chances in November.

The biggest — and most surprising — news of the night was nonprofit executive Kara Eastman’s nomination in Nebraska’s 2nd Congressional District. Although former U.S. Rep. Brad Ashford had both the money and the backing of national Democrats, Eastman defeated him 51 percent to 49 percent. Like many of Tuesday’s victorious Democrats, Eastman won by throwing red (blue?) meat to the liberal base: Where Ashford touted his ability to build consensus in Congress, Eastman promised confrontation and, well, resistance to President Trump.

Day 483: Thursday, May 17

One Year In

From Left: Donald Trump, Bayrock Group Chairman Tevfik Arif, and Felix Sater at the Trump Soho launch party on Sept. 19, 2007, in New York. (Mark Von Holden/WireImage)

Over the last several decades, President Trump has pursued multiple Trump Tower deals in Moscow. One of those pursuits has drawn the attention of Special Counsel Robert Mueller.

According to questions drafted by Trump’s attorney Jay Sekulow, Mueller is seeking to ask the following question:

“What communication did you have with Michael D. Cohen, Felix Sater, and others, including foreign nationals, about Russian real estate developments during the campaign?”

While Donald Trump was running for president, the Trump Organization sought to develop a huge Trump Tower in Moscow. Trump signed a letter of intent in October 2015, a few months into his presidential campaign, to pursue this venture. Trump’s longtime mob-connected associate, and at times FBI informant, Felix Sater was working closely with Trump’s fixer Michael Cohen (at the time he played the role of Trump Organization Executive Vice President) towards this deal.

Cohen has publicly stated that the deal fell through in January 2016. Documents obtained by Buzzfeed News indicate that the deal was still actively being pursued well into June of the 2016 campaign. It didn’t stop there. Plans were reportedly being discussed for then-candidate Donald Trump to meet face-to-face with Russian President Vladimir after the Republican Convention:

This is, assuming it’s true, a holy shit story: While Trump was preparing for the Republican convention in spring 2016, Michael Cohen was still negotiating Trump Tower Moscow and was working on a Trump-Putin meeting to take place after the convention to finalize the deal. pic.twitter.com/MheCbmdUor

Let’s put the timing of this in perspective. This deal was still being pursued while Donald Trump’s family and campaign chairman sought dirt on Hillary Clinton from Russian operatives who were seeking sanctions relief in that June 2016 Trump Tower meeting. This deal was still being pursued right as Wikileaks prepared to release DNC emails that were DNC emails obtained through a Russian intelligence operation (leaks that Trump and his family relentlessly helped disseminate).

From what we know about the way President Trump conducts himself, he treats countries who appeal to his business needs with preferential treatment. That was certainly the case here.

Meanwhile…

After North Korea threatened to pull out of the upcoming summit, President Donald Trump threw a wrench in the talks.

New: Trump says the Libya “model would take place if we don’t make a deal” with North Korea but if a deal is made “Kim Jong Un is going to be very, very happy”: pic.twitter.com/aiD1iF8ltV

On the one year anniversary, since Robert Mueller was appointed as Special Counsel, President Trump disparaged the investigation.

Congratulations America, we are now into the second year of the greatest Witch Hunt in American History…and there is still No Collusion and No Obstruction. The only Collusion was that done by Democrats who were unable to win an Election despite the spending of far more money!

Despite the disgusting, illegal and unwarranted Witch Hunt, we have had the most successful first 17 month Administration in U.S. history – by far! Sorry to the Fake News Media and “Haters,” but that’s the way it is!

It appears we need to add another number to the list of plea deals. Reutersreported:

The former son-in-law of Paul Manafort, the one-time chairman of President Donald Trump’s campaign, has cut a plea deal with the Justice Department that requires him to cooperate with other criminal probes, two people with knowledge of the matter said.

The guilty plea agreement, which is under seal and has not been previously reported, could add to the legal pressure on Manafort, who is facing two indictments brought by Special Counsel Robert Mueller in his probe of alleged Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election.

When it comes to the case of Manafort, there was more news: Mueller filed an unredacted memo outlining the scope of his probe to Judge T.S. Ellis.

President Trump is now just as eager to expose the US intelligence source as the House Republicans are. The Washington Postreported:

President Trump’s allies are waging an increasingly aggressive campaign to undercut the Russia investigation by exposing the role of a top-secret FBI source. The effort reached new heights Thursday as Trump alleged that an informant had improperly spied on his 2016 campaign and predicted that the ensuing scandal would be “bigger than Watergate!”

The extraordinary push begun by a cadre of Trump boosters on Capitol Hill now has champions across the GOP and throughout conservative media — and, as of Thursday, the first anniversary of Robert S. Mueller III’s appointment as special counsel, bears the imprimatur of the president.

The dispute pits Trump and the Republican chairman of the House Intelligence Committee against the Justice Department and intelligence agencies, whose leaders warn that publicly identifying the confidential source would put lives in danger and imperil other operations.

The right tried to claim that President Trump’s comments about immigrants being “animals” was specifically about MS-13. If you look at not only the context of his conversation but his worldview as a whole, it’s not that simple.

ICE arrested a dreamer, revoked his DACA status, placed him in detention, and attempted to deport him, claiming he was a gang member. A federal judge just ruled that ICE was lying—brazenly, intentionally, repeatedly, and illegally. https://t.co/U2u25mzUqQ@Slate

The company controlled by the family of the White House adviser Jared Kushner is close to receiving a bailout of its troubled flagship building by a company with financial ties to the government of Qatar, according to executives briefed on the deal.

Charles Kushner, head of the Kushner Companies, is in advanced talks with Brookfield Asset Management over a partnership to take control of the 41-story aluminum-clad tower in Midtown Manhattan, 666 Fifth Avenue, according to two real estate executives who have been briefed on the pending deal but were not authorized to discuss it. Brookfield is a publicly traded company, and its real estate arm, Brookfield Property Partners, is partly owned by the Qatari government, through the Qatar Investment Authority.

Michael Avenatti, Stephanie Clifford’s (Stormy Daniels) lawyer, left us on the edge of our seats once again.

.@MichaelAvenatti just said on MSNBC that he’s vetting two other women who claim they signed NDAs and got hush money payments from Trump after having affairs with him. “May create additional exposure,” he says. #BigWhoaIfTrue

Day 484: Friday, May 18

This Is America

(Michael Murphy)

On Friday, tragedy struck.

It feels like just yesterday the nation was reeling from the loss of life in Parkland, Florida and subsequently looked to the future with hope as the March For Our Lives leaders proclaimed #NeverAgain.

But here we are…again.

In the 22nd school shooting so far this year, 9 students and 1 teacher were shot and killed at Santa Fe High School in Texas.

The killer was a 17-year-old white male who was a student at the school. He was reportedly wearing a trench coat and was armed with a shotgun and a revolver that he obtained from his father. Explosives were later found near the school. Some info about the shooter was discovered:

NEW: The Santa Fe High School gunman killed a classmate, Shana Fisher, who had turned down his advances, her mother tells us. Shana finally stood up to him and embarrassed him in class, and “a week later he opens fire on everyone he didn’t like.” https://t.co/clHL0gO6zP

More people have been killed at schools this year than have been killed while serving in the military.

Source: The Washington Post

This is the country we live in. Month after month, we watch as our children are gunned down in the hallways they are supposed to be seeking knowledge in, with their whole lives ahead of them. Instead, our classrooms are war zones with children living in fear.

The GOP consistently advocates against gun control measures at the behest of the NRA. Instead, they claim mental health is the issue. Let’s say we let them have that argument. Well, in that case, why do they roll back access to affordable health care every chance they get, endeavor to cut Medicaid, etc. If they really wanted to solve this problem at its core and not pass any meaningful gun reform, wouldn’t they want more access to healthcare so that every child in America would have access to a therapist?

Welcome to America. A country where Republican leaders who are in control of all branches of government refuse to do anything about the gun epidemic plaguing our nation.

The Trump administration is proposing a far-reaching change in the distribution of Title X family-planning funds that would make clinics that provide abortion services or referrals ineligible for the federal funding. The move would potentially defund Planned Parenthood by millions of dollars.

Under the proposal filed Thursday and announced Friday by the Department of Health and Human Services, the $260 million program would require a “bright line” of physical and financial separation between Title X services and providers that perform or support abortion services or refer to abortion as a method of family planning.

Records pertaining to the financial activities of President Trump’s lawyer Michael Cohen are not missing from a government database; rather, Treasury Department officials have taken the highly unusual step of restricting access to them even from certain law enforcement agencies, according to three sources familiar with the matter.

The New Yorker magazine this week reported that a law enforcement official — worried the information about Cohen’s banking records had been removed from government databases and therefore might be covered up — had admitted to leaking some of what was still accessible.

Special Counsel Robert Mueller reportedly subpoenaed another associate of Roger Stone, this time a key assistant.

Rudy Giuliani made a series of claims. Like everything he says, take it with a grain of salt. Giuliani claimed that Mueller has agreed to narrow the scope of questions he wants to ask and that the President cannot obstruct justice (tell that to Richard Nixon).

On Friday, the historically bipartisan farm bill was voted down in the House, 198-213. What ultimately led to the bill’s downfall was not only the unanimous opposition by the Democrats, but the GOP leadership’s inability to muster up the support it needed from the House Freedom Caucus. The notoriously difficult group of Conservatives were intent on holding the bill hostage until a highly controversial immigration bill was brought to the floor.

The farm bill was struck down today because the @HouseGOP couldn’t decide whether or not it wanted to devastate food stamp recipients or pursue an aggressive immigration policy first. https://t.co/thgxPWkzq0

President Donald Trump went on a tweet storm trying to claim that an informant spied on his campaign. Like much of what Trump says, that is not exactly true. Former FBI counterintelligence agent Asha Rangappa explains how the informant was not spying on the Trump campaign, but as part of the counterintelligence operation may have been trying to protect the campaign.

But Trump and his backers are wrong about what it means that the FBI reportedly was using a confidential source to gather information early in its investigation of possible campaign ties to Russia. The investigation started out as a counterintelligence probe, not a criminal one. And relying on a covert source rather than a more intrusive method of gathering information suggests that the FBI may have been acting cautiously — perhaps too cautiously — to protect the campaign, not undermine it.

I love it when the @nytimes verifies my op-ed theory. The idea that the FBI was trying to “do in” Trump is hogwash. They were being cautious and slow (perhaps too much so, IMO) so as not to draw attention to their investigation. pic.twitter.com/pTmNwqOqBa

Just to be clear, the big NYT and WaPo pieces explaining the real story with the FBI informant have reduced the narrative being pushed by Trump, Nunes and their loyal propagandists to a pile of smoking rubble. https://t.co/6wfNUydHrz

This didn’t stop the President and House Republicans efforts to expose the individual, and on Friday night, members of the media effectively did their work for them.

While it doesn’t name him, this @nytimes piece essentially outs the alleged informant, as have several right-wing accounts. And that’s precisely what Nunes and his conspirators set out to do. https://t.co/aG3YAxk49m

“The professor who met with both Page and Papadopoulos is Stefan Halper, a former official in the Nixon, Ford and Reagan administrations who has been a paid consultant to an internal Pentagon think tank known as the Office of Net Assessment.” https://t.co/8Jdu8XqtbI

NYT, WaPo, & NBC all received confirmation about the identity of the source. It’s a full court press. If POTUS didn’t declassify the name, the leaker committed a felony, these outlets are carrying water for the GOP, & are endangering NatSec

Over the weekend…

On Saturday, a bombshell story from The New York Times broke. It revealed that in August 2016 (three months before the election) Donald Trump Jr. held a meeting at Trump Tower that indicates the campaign was willing to accept help from more foreign nations than just Russia…

Three months before the 2016 election, a small group gathered at Trump Tower to meet with Donald Trump Jr., the president’s eldest son. One was an Israeli specialist in social media manipulation. Another was an emissary for two wealthy Arab princes. The third was a Republican donor with a controversial past in the Middle East as a private security contractor.

The meeting was convened primarily to offer help to the Trump team, and it forged relationships between the men and Trump insiders that would develop over the coming months — past the election and well into President Trump’s first year in office, according to several people with knowledge of their encounters.

Erik Prince, the private security contractor and the former head of Blackwater, arranged the meeting, which took place on Aug. 3, 2016. The emissary, George Nader, told Donald Trump Jr. that the princes who led Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates were eager to help his father win election as president. The social media specialist, Joel Zamel, extolled his company’s ability to give an edge to a political campaign; by that time, the firm had already drawn up a multimillion-dollar proposal for a social media manipulation effort to help elect Mr. Trump.

The company, which employed several Israeli former intelligence officers, specialized in collecting information and shaping opinion through social media.

The piece goes on to say that Donald Trump Jr. “responded approvingly” to the offer but it wasn’t clear whether it was acted on. But it does indicate one of Zamel’s companies was paid after the election.

After Mr. Trump was elected, Mr. Nader paid Mr. Zamel a large sum of money, described by one associate as up to $2 million. There are conflicting accounts of the reason for the payment, but among other things, a company linked to Mr. Zamel provided Mr. Nader with an elaborate presentation about the significance of social media campaigning to Mr. Trump’s victory.

Zamel’s companies also have ties to two Russian Oligarchs that we are all too familiar with.

Companies connected to Mr. Zamel also have ties to Russia. One of his firms had previously worked for oligarchs linked to Mr. Putin, including Oleg V. Deripaska and Dmitry Rybolovlev, who hired the firm for online campaigns against their business rivals.

Mr. Deripaska, an aluminum magnate, was once in business with the former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, who has pleaded not guilty in the special counsel investigation to charges of financial crimes and failing to disclose the lobbying work he did on behalf of a former president of Ukraine, an ally of Mr. Putin. Mr. Rybolovlev once purchased a Florida mansion from Mr. Trump.

The Trump family has paid their way around the law their entire lives

I’m unsurprised at the lengths they are willing to go to win—no matter how illegal or unethical

Thus far they’ve bailed themselves out of consequences, so they believe they’re above the law

It appears that the President has since taken a very friendly stance with all of the nations who have reportedly offered to help his campaign.

The weekend wasn’t over yet…

President Trump sent out a tweet that marked a serious escalation.

I hereby demand, and will do so officially tomorrow, that the Department of Justice look into whether or not the FBI/DOJ infiltrated or surveilled the Trump Campaign for Political Purposes – and if any such demands or requests were made by people within the Obama Administration!

The President of the United States just demanded the Justice Department investigate his political opponents in an effort to undermine the Justice Department’s Russia investigation–a probe he is a subject of

I normally ignore presidential tweets. This one requires attention, because it could genuinely produce a crisis with the Justice Department and the FBI. Here’s an explanatory thread that may (or may not) be useful. /1/ https://t.co/uB62J45TwK

]]>https://rantt.com/a-complete-breakdown-of-donald-trumps-69th-unpresidented-week-as-potus/feed/019320Republican Climate Change Denial Is The Real Hoaxhttps://rantt.com/republican-climate-change-denial-is-the-real-hoax/
https://rantt.com/republican-climate-change-denial-is-the-real-hoax/#respondSun, 20 May 2018 00:10:36 +0000https://rantt.com/?p=19260Jim Bridenstine's sudden agreement with the scientific consensus on climate change hints that the GOP isn't as skeptical about the science when it suits them

When Trump announced noted climate change denier Jim Bridenstine as the future head of NASA, it seemed like one more borderline sarcastic pick to lead an important government agency. By then we already had an FCC commissioner who doesn’t believe in regulation of telecom companies, a Secretary of Education who despised public schools, and an EPA head who used to constantly sue the agency. So sure, why not have someone who doesn’t believe in science in charge of NASA possibly tasking it to study climate change on Mars to support a long discredited denialist talking point? But something strange happened after his confirmation.

Speaking at a NASA town hall, Bridenstine said that humans were very much responsible for global warming and he’s fully behind the scientific consensus, adding “we are putting [carbon dioxide] into the atmosphere in volumes we haven’t seen before.” That’s a pretty stark departure from his stance that global warming was caused by the sun and oceanic cycles. Likewise, the GOP-controlled Congress reversed Trump’s decision to cancel NASA’s climate change observing missions, nixing only one relatively small experiment. And this prompts the obvious question of why we’re seeing such an about-face on climate science where it really counts.

One theory that may explain why climatology is still on NASA’s agenda is that the agency’s findings wouldn’t have any regulatory impact on their own. They’re just that, findings that will be detailed in scientific papers and used for further research. Only the EPA and the DOE could make the call to codify and enforce policy around this data. As long as that’s not happening under Energy Secretary Rick Perry (who famously said that fossil fuels could prevent rape in developing countries and should be subsidized even if they’re unprofitable) and EPA Director Scott Pruitt (who loves being wined and dined by fossil fuel lobbyists), the GOP is perfectly fine with letting scientists do their work in relative peace and with adequate funding.

Meanwhile, the base is told that climate change is a socialist conspiracy to take their property and make foreign countries richer at America’s expense — even though its effects cost trillions of dollars in lost productivity for China and India — so they don’t suddenly start supporting the kinds of regulations that could cost big donors. Of course, this would mean that the Republican stance on climate change is deeply cynical and many don’t really believe their own talking points on the subject. They’re just using it as another wedge culture war issue to get themselves elected and protecting donors’ profits to fund their campaigns by keeping the scientists off their backs long enough for said donors to make a profitable, slow, transition to green energy if and when they choose to do so.

Given that context, one wonders how much of a denier Bridenstine really was. Did he just play the part and ride the anti-science conspiracy theory train for cheap political points and now, at NASA he can finally drop the act? Did his thinking on the subject change over time? Will he start trying to help shut down any research that could prompt new legislation which hits fossil fuel companies in the wallet behind the scenes while paying lip service to it? Either way, his reversal on the subject and his colleagues’ actions seem to show a pattern of cynicism and duplicity and we can only guess whether they’re ready to get on board with science but are trapped by the conspiracy-driven right-wing media machine, or there’s something more happening in their ranks behind closed doors.

Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, R-Wis., points to his copy of the Constitution on Capitol Hill in Washington, Wednesday, July 6, 2016. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

On Friday, the historically bipartisan farm bill was voted down in the House, 198-213. What ultimately led to the bill’s downfall was not only the unanimous opposition by the Democrats, but the GOP leadership’s inability to muster up the support it needed from the House Freedom Caucus. The notoriously difficult group of Conservatives were intent on holding the bill hostage until a highly controversial immigration bill was brought to the floor.

The standoff in the Republican Party boiled down to whether or not the GOP’s legislative agenda should prioritize Paul Ryan’s dream of destroying the social safety net over the pursuit of an aggressive immigration policy. The farm bill would have imposed strict work requirements for those currently benefiting under Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) – commonly referred to as food stamps – affecting millions. Nancy Pelosi has said, “this bad bill steals food off the tables of children, seniors, students – 1.5 million of our veterans rely on the nutrition provision of this bill”

The immigration bill that the Freedom Caucus wanted to bring to the floor was the Securing America’s Future Act (H.R. 4760) co-sponsored by House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.), and House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Michael McCaul (R-Tx). The Goodlatte-McCaul bill would provide additional funding for the wall, crack down hard on sanctuary cities, and calls for an “additional 5,000 Border Patrol Agents and 5,000 Customs & Border Protection Officers,” and ends so-called “chain-migration.”

Even though the farm bill was killed in the House today, the Republican agenda is clear. Variations of both of these bills will be revived at some point, and if passed, will have detrimental consequences for entitlement programs and American immigration policy as we currently know it.

Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA), a possible candidate for Paul Ryan’s job after his retirement, was quoted saying, “we want to get a farm bill passed obviously to get the work requirements in place. And we also want to get an agreement on how to address the immigration problem and we’ve been making a lot of headway.”